On Monday, we should reflect on the price of freedom – Galveston County Daily News

The official observance of Memorial Day is Monday.

The core meaning of the day often gets lost among all the other things it has come to represent the beginning of summer, the end of the school year and the first weekend of make-it-or-break-it time for many local businesses.

Even people not tuned out of the original intent often miss the point. They thank veterans and active members of the armed services. Nothing is wrong with that, but its slightly off the mark.

Memorial Day is for honoring the dead. Its for remembering and honoring members of the armed forces killed, typically young, often as teenagers, during combat in service to the nation and those who died by other causes during times of war.

Those who survived deserve respect and thanks, but other days are set aside for that. Memorial Day is for the dead.

The number of those war dead is sobering. More than 1 million, counting all the dead in wars large and small since the revolution, according to the Congressional Research Service.

Thats not counting the missing and those killed in training, which are substantial numbers.

Every Memorial Day, we should reflect about what those million Americans bought with their lives.

And that seems especially important this year.

We send our troops to war with assurances they are defending all thats good about the nation democracy, freedom, justice, prosperity and to secure peace.

Americans have responded to the call to arms throughout our history for various reasons, including that they had no choice.

And while the assurances have been more true at some times in our history than at others, probably most of those who answered the call had some belief they were sacrificing in service to the high ideals that define the nation.

Because of the coronavirus, were in a period of government intrusion into our civil liberties. Whether the extent to which all levels of government have curtailed civil and commercial life is entirely necessary and appropriate remains to be seen.

Either way, this time, like every time, were obliged to watch carefully, question thoroughly and demand the government objectively justify every check on those rights and freedoms.

Its not a matter of left or right, Democrat or Republican. Its far more basic than that, and neither end of the ideological spectrum can claim to have never offered a government chit purporting to guarantee our safety in exchange for some of our rights and freedoms.

The Democratic administration of Woodrow Wilson imposed draconian restrictions on civil liberties and attempted to turn us into nation of snitches, for our own good, of course, because agents of Kaiser might be under every bed.

On Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks killed 2,799 people, a good rough average of the daily COVID-19 death toll. In response, lawmakers in a mere 45 days used fear and national security to jam through the USA Patriot Act, the first of numerous laws making it easier for the government to spy on ordinary Americans by monitoring phone and email communications, collecting bank and credit reporting records and by tracking the activity of innocent Americans on the internet.

That offense to the Constitution began under the Republican administration of George W. Bush, but both parties were solidly behind it in the House and Senate, as were the conservatives now in a tizzy over face coverings.

And some of those same conservatives, in their zeal to punish migrant workers, have argued seriously for ending birth-right citizenship, the foundation of every other right; without which every other right becomes a government-issued privilege for every one of us.

The fear of COVID-19 is real, as was the fear of terrorism, although both fears are out of proportion to actual threat.

Even if both were greater threats, and even if the offers of greater safety were genuine, the rights and freedoms at issue are not ours to trade away. They belong to a million Americans who paid for them with their lives.

Michael A. Smith

See the original post here:

On Monday, we should reflect on the price of freedom - Galveston County Daily News